I Chose To Live The Rat Wheel
Working from home, I got used to starting a video call by asking: “Hi, good morning! How are you?” My colleague's answers normally differ from “Good, thanks” and “Not bad”.
Except for John.
He always — I mean always — replies with “Living my dreams”. And whenever I listen to that, I think, he’s got to be kidding me.
“I mean it. This is it, right? Living my dreams. That’s what we got for now”, he adds.
Often I catch myself rambling about it (maybe because I have at least one meeting a week with this wonderful character). Can I truly define what my deepest dreams are? But not in a childish way. We love chocolate, but we can’t live on that alone. And we know that things don’t always have just one side of the coin. Live is full of facets, good and bad sides, yin yang, the moon and the sun, you get the point here. So come on, is living at the beach, working for a bar during summertime serving coconuts is really a dream? Imagine the back pain that would come with that. And all that sunscreen that you got to pass every hour or so. Looks very nice, the first few days. Then I bet you would find that some things annoy you. We can get sick even of what we might say it’s a dream, if we are always in the pursuit of something else, something beyond, that is out of our reach right now, like a… dream!
Follow me here. You can create the life of your dreams if they are realistic. You can be a painter. You can work to save the bees. What’s stopping you? But are you really going to be fulfilled with it? Are you ok with the pros and cons that come with it? If the answer is yes, just go for it. If not, stop complaining that the rat wheel is killing you. There is no easy choice, when we decide we want to do something in this life, we got to accept the consequences of it.
True balance comes when we are conscious about our choices. And I am going to be pretty honest with you here. That’s why I chose to live the rat wheel. I recognize the positive and negative sides of it. The good things of being a traditional employee, like having certain stability, several holidays a year, a salary on the same day every month, being able to buy things that will give me a comfortable life, like a good mattress. And I am also fine with working 40 hours per week in exchange for a weekend without work-related stress, because it’s not my business, literally. Do I really like blocking almost my whole day for work, 9 am to 6 pm, from Monday to Friday? Not really. But if the overall balance is positive for me today, I am peaceful with it.
Acknowledging my choices and stopping dreaming of dreams, I gotta tell you my friend, is very relaxing. I learned that with self-knowledge comes freedom.
I may even say that I am living my dreams.
Thanks, John.
